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asgarcymedFlag for Portugal

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Linux P2V

I have a laptop where I have installed Mandriva Linux. Everything was OK until my father had decided to remove the internal hard disk (HDD) to change it for a bigger one... My father went to a computers' shop and the employee physically removed the internal HDD and changed it for a bigger one. My initial HDD is unchanged, so it has Mandriva Linux installed on it, with GRUB being the boot manager installed on boot sector. And my father also bought an external box that can receive an internal HDD, and that connects to a computer via USB (the internal HDD is connected to the box which has a USB port).  
Since I have all my things in the first HDD (my Mandriva Linux), I want to migrate it to inside a virtual machine, I mean a Physical-toVirtual ("P2V") migration; the virtual machine should allow me to access to my Mandriva Linux again.
I can use all x86 virtual machines - VMWare, Virtual PC, Parallels, SVISTA, Qemu, Bochs - tell me which one you prefer... I can use Windows or Linux as host OS.
I tried to use the HDD directly in VMWare (it has the option to use a physical disk from a virtual machine), and I got an error appearing during the boot's sequence:  
«Kernel panic - not syncing : No init found. Try passing init = option to kernel». I think this is because the virtualized/emulated hardware is different from my laptop's hardware. I think building a new kernel would solve this, but I do not know how to do that... I feel I am incapable of doing it alone... I am a too much newbie... That is very hard... Only for experts...
Is there any way to build a new kernel automatically? Is there other solution?
VMware P2V Assistant? PlateSpin? Invirtus? UltraBac? LeoStream? Acronis? - all these work when migrating (P2V) a Windows OS; but I did not understand if the same is true about Linux P2V.
I hope I have been explicit enough... Could you really understand my problem ?  
Thanks in advance.  
Best regards.
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wesly_chen
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Thank you!